The value of health and wealth is thus depreciated in a manner that might tend to aggravate the recklessness of life-weariness; yet the South Mongol is conservative, even in his vices. An inalienable instinct of thrift makes him shrink from senseless excesses. Tavern brawls are less frequent in Canton than in Edinburgh; the topers of the Flowery Kingdom get less efflorescent than ours, their love-crazed swains less extravagant. Absolute imbecility, as a consequence of poison habits, is a rare phenomenon in Mongoldom; nine out of ten sots remain self-supporting; the heritage of industrial habits is hardly ever lost altogether. Nor should we forget to distinguish the primitive rustics of the inland provinces from the vice-worn population of the coast plains. Degeneration has not left its marks far above tide-water, and has hardly begun to affect the natives of the highlands, the Yunan hunting tribes, for instance, who, though South Mongols, have renounced the tenets of Buddha and adopted those of militant Mohammed. Their chieftains welcomed war for its own sake, while the lowland conscripts were in the predicament of desert dwellers, caught in the flood of a sudden cloudburst. Thousands at first succumbed almost without a struggle; the levies drilled to oppose the Japanese invasion stood to be slaughtered like sheep, being, moreover, morally handicapped by a misgiving that the war with the champions of the north had been wantonly provoked. Discipline has begun to break the spell of that apathy, but the desperate valor that surprised the veterans of the allies at Taku and Yangtsun had a very different significance. Fury supplied the defects of military training; the listless life-renouncers had at last been goaded into a frenzy of nationalistic resentment. It was the same delirium of retributive wrath that rallied a million Frenchmen around the standards of the invaded Republic, and hurled a horde of Russian volunteers into the bullet-storm of Borodino. ‘A united nation of fifteen millions is not vincible’, wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau, in reply to an appeal of the Polish patriots. South Mongols were supposed to be hardly worth an expedition of Caucasian regulars, but even a world coalition might find use for intrenchments if the vendetta rage of a war for national existence should arouse a land of 385,000,000 inhabitants. Whether that storm will purify the social atmosphere of the vast empire or subside into the calm of exhaustion, is a different question. It would even be premature to accept the appearance of a few able leaders as a propitious omen of regeneration. In a land ten times the size of France the crisis of a fearful peril will always evolve a Carnot, a Danton and a Dumouriez, if not a storm-compelling Bonaparte.